A Thorough Look at Bards in D&D and GURPS

A Thorough Look at Bards in D&D and GURPS

Bard is one of the core D&D classes that has been present in every edition since AD&D 1e. The D&D community sure likes its bard memes about seducing dragons that totally didn’t get old twenty years ago. My personal D&D experience begins with 3.0 and I have to say that I’ve never seen a bard PC or even NPC. Nobody was interested in this class, and even I never liked it much. Something always felt off about the bard. About a month ago, when I was reworking my GURPS implementation of D&D classes, I decided to take a good look at the bard to understand what’s the reason for my distaste and what can be done with it.

Let’s start right in the middle – D&D 3.0. What is a bard? A bard is a versatile class with class features that allow the bard to inspire courage, competence, greatness, or heroics in his teammates, fascinate others or implant suggestions, and know a lot thanks to the Bardic Knowledge feature. There’s also the countersong ability that, while flavorful, is rarely useful. In addition, bards can spontaneously cast arcane spells up to the 6^th level.

First, let’s take a closer look at bardic spellcasting. The spell list is just all over the place. There is no coherent theme – the list includes illusions, sonic spells, mind control, divination, summoning, buffs, monster summoning, Grease, and, surprisingly, healing spells. If I am not mistaken, healing spells were restricted to divine spellcasters before the third edition. There are… Well, there were D&D 3.5 articles on the WotC website about a wizard who was so determined to circumvent the problem of arcane spellcasters being unable to cast healing spells that he managed to breach planar boundaries and find an obscure Outer Plane that he dubbed the Elemental Plane of Blood. Did he just forget that bards exist? Or did WotC forget that?

Where does bardic magic come from? We know that wizards learn their spells through intense study. We know that sorcerers have innate magic in their blood. The bard’s description says that “a bard’s magic comes from the heart” and then that “a bard brings forth magic from his soul, not from a book.” On the next page, the book says that “an apprentice bard learns his skills from a single experienced bard” and that “bards occasionally congregate in informal colleges.” I’m not sure if this means skills in the literal sense, or if this includes magic. However, other books that talk about the colleges say that they are devoted mostly to academic pursuits instead of magical ones. The spell description chapter in Player’s Handbook says that bardic magic requires both natural talent and long study. So, how does one learn bardic magic? What’s the source of this talent? What does “comes from the heart/soul” mean? Are they sorcerers in denial?

The 3.0e book titled Song and Silence is half-devoted to the bard class. The 3.5e Complete Arcane only takes a couple of paragraphs from its predecessor about the bard, missing the good stuff. For example, both books say that bards are widely accepted everywhere and that as a bard you can easily show up at a king’s throne room and expect to be let in. Even monsters may decide to talk to you or spare your life. However, only the 3.0 book explains why this is the case. It doesn’t have anything to do with the real world reason for bards being respected, but still is a decent explanation. The 3.5 book simply states it as a fact. Why? Because the 3.0 books generally were better, even though most players consider 3.0e and 3.5e to be identical.

So, what is the role of the bard? In-universe, bards are diplomats, messengers, academics, swindlers, performers, and jack-of-all-trades adventurers. I always thought that bards being diplomats and messengers was a bit strange. If I were a king, I would be very suspicious of diplomats that can influence or even control your mind, divine your state secrets, and create illusions. In what nowadays is called the Get-along Gang paradigm, the party role of the bard is a bit muddled. Since he is a jack-of-all-trades, he can be a substitute for any party role, but also plays a support role with all the bardic performances giving bonuses to the other party members. However, I recall character builds floating online of bards dishing out some obscene damage.

All right, let’s get to the point – what’s my problem with the bard class? For the most part, the spellcasting. The spell list is all over the place, the source of magic is unclear, and it feels that bardic spellcasting just lacks identity. The support role that is forced on you with bardic performance, healing spells, and buff spells, feels artificial, like something out of an MMO. The bardic performance itself feel a bit off, yet again like an array of switchable auras from an MMO.

But what about other editions, what is the bard like there? In AD&D 2e, the bard is a rogue subclass. What I appreciate is that there is a box that talks about the historical inspiration for bards. You can read even more about that in GURPS Celtic Myth. The 2e bard has almost everything the more modern bards do, but with two important differences. First, while they do remain arcane spellcasters, the nature of their magic is much better defined. Bards simply learn some random wizard spells in their travels. They do not have their own spell list or mechanics, and instead are treated as dabbling wizards. I like this much better than what 3e offers us, as it makes much more sense both in-universe and mechanically.

Second important difference is that the bardic performance is not a magic aura that you just turn on and off in combat, but just mundane inspirational speeches and recitations that have to be performed before the battle begins. This makes so much more sense. It also ties well with mass combat, as it improves morale of troops, which makes the bard a good leader. With only these two changes, I suddenly have no problem with the bard class. Now it feels reasonable.

In AD&D 1e, the bard is an optional class that is something between the fighter, thief, and druid. To become a bard, you must have Strength, Wisdom, Dexterity, and Charisma of 15 or better, and at least 12 in Intelligence and a 10 in Constitution. Since ability scores are rolled randomly, you have to be very lucky. Then comes the interesting part – bards begin play as fighters, then after attaining the 5^th level but before they attain the 8^th level, they have to change their class to that of thieves. Then, sometime between 5^th and 9^th level, bards must leave the thief class and find a druid that would teach them druidic arts, and only then they can become proper bards. In this convoluted, but interesting way, the bard can be said to be a prestige class before prestige classes were a thing.

In terms of abilities, bards know many languages, can use their music and poetry to charm or inspire. Unlike the 2e bard, the 1e bard can inspire while in combat. In addition, the 1e bard is adept at identifying magic items and can cast druidic spells. Overall, I think this is a better incarnation than the 3e bard, but a bit worse than the 2e bard, even though the 1e bard is closer to the historical bards.

The 4e bard is a support class that has even more access to healing abilities than before, but overall retains the concept of the 3e bard. The 5e bard is similar to the 3e bard, but has slightly different class features and flavor. Now, the bard has to pick a college, and depending on the college chosen, they can inspire others, hinder others, or do other stuff. I have to point out that the cutting words ability of the College of Lore seems to be inspired by the 3.5e jester class, and that the song of rest ability is a 4e remnant.

The source of bardic magic now is said to be the Words of Creation used by gods to sing the world into existence. This being the source of bardic magic is new, even though the Words of Creation are not. The concept of Words of Creation appeared in the Book of Exalted Deeds in 3e as a feat. While they could be used to augment bardic performance, Words of Creation had more to do with, well, creation. They also had some overlap with truename magic and could be used to communicate as a proper language. In 4e, the Words of Creation seem to have been subsumed into the Supernal language – the language of the gods that actually had something in common with the alignment languages. Also, if Mystara lore is to be believed, the gods didn’t create the world, so there may be some lore contradictions, but it can be justified by the obscure nature of the origin of the universe.

That’s it for the D&D bard. But what about the ACKS bard? Let’s take a look at what ACKS did with it. The ACKS bard is the most similar to the 2e bard. He can inspire courage, which does include a morale bonus to troops – something very important in mass combat in ACKS, and just like the 2e bard, he can only do that before the battle begins. However, unlike all the other bards, the ACKS bard isn’t a spellcaster. Instead, he can use magic items only usable my arcane casters. Overall, this is another very good take on the class, in my opinion.

So, with this historical overview out of the way, what did I end up doing in my games? Initially, I had bardic spellcasting written up as something closer to the sorcerer, and each bard variant (and D&D had many of them – the dirgesinger, sublime chord, spellsinger, spelldancer, etc.) had different scope limitations. What I ended up doing was selecting everything and hitting the Delete key, then writing a small box that says that bards learn the Enthrallment and Musical Influence skills and, optionally, may learn to cast spells as other classes. This way, I included the most appropriate bardic abilities that exist as skills in GURPS, and allowed them to dabble in arcane, divine, or druidic arts. This will let you create a dabbler-wizard bard like the 2e bard, a druidic bard like the 1e bard, a divine bard like that 3e Unearthed Arcana variant class, or a spell-less bard like the ACKS bard. In effect, I covered all the bases and removed all the stuff from the post-TSR era of bardhood that feels inappropriate to me. I think that is the best solution possible.